Gilbert Sorrentino Quotes

What a joke it is to read or hear - as I have read or heard more times than I can count - that writers 'see more clearly' or 'feel more deeply' than non-writers. The truth of the matter is that writers hardly 'see' or 'feel' at all. The disparity between a writer's works and the world per se is so great as to beggar comment. Writers who arrange their lives so as to 'have experiences' in order to reduce them to contemptible linguistic recordings of these experiences are beneath contempt.

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artis

They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter's constant debasement.

He wiped her forehead and stroked her shoulders, worshiping her pain. He went to get a Coke and brought it back to her, but she only sipped at it, then said O God! and bent over to throw up. He held her hips while she vomited, loving the waste and odor of her. She lay down on the ground and he lay next to her, stroking her breasts until the nipples were erect under her cotton blouse. My period, she said. God, it just ruins me at the beginning. You bleeding, vomiting, incredible thing, he thought. You should have stayed in, he said. The moonlight of her teeth. I didn't want to miss a night with you, she said. It's August. Stars, my friend, great flashing stars fell on Alabama.

I like to synthesize; I hate analysis. I don't like to take a subject and break it down into parts; I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens. I believe the old saw that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Of course, it may also be less. But it's the parts that interest me; it's not the whole.

Only death can cure the hip dilettante.

The maimings of love are endlessly funny....

All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.

Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.

What is this thing called a kiss? French, tongue, soul, chaste, motherly, fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, ass, genital, Judas, trembling, rough, hesitant, sweet, soft, wet, dying, fevered, good-night, farewell, burning, and chocolate.

On Being Blue celebrates both language and that which it represents and carefully draws our attention to that difficult middle ground on which the writer finds himself in lifelong struggle to join the two without sullying or smearing the clarities of either.

Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.

He hadn't "abused" alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen.

I like the cut of his jib and the glint in his eye, the arrow of his song and the beg of his question.

There is no sincere stupidity that doesn't create, eventually, its own rationale, conduct, operating procedures, its own critical formulae whereby it may be, in all seriousness, discussed: witness the advertising business. Witness the best-seller list. Areas of idiocy within which various degrees of the spurious are compared.